Ball State

» Credit Cards in the world today

By China at 11:41 AM

In my finance class I am learning so much more about ‘real life' than I thought I would. With our economy being the way it is now there is so much to learn and thankfully I am learning it now before graduation, instead of later when I'm actually facing these issues. We learned a lot about credit cards for our last test. We usually focus on several topics for each test since we only have three in the whole semester but my teacher (who is a financial planner) felt that as college students we needed to spend more time on our bank accounts and credit cards.

First of all we learned about merchant accounts. With a merchant account, a bank extends a line of credit to a merchant. We talked a lot about this and the way that it has affected our economy. But mainly we talked about credit cards and credit in general.

First of all is there anywhere that you can think of that doesn't accept credit cards? There is one place that I know of, it is a tiny family store by my house, but I heard that they recently switched over to accept credit cards because it became such a hassle for customers. Even though they have now switched, the cute old man that owns it (and has been running it with his family since before I was born) always feels like he needs to bring up the cons of using your credit card. He tends to make people that don't know him feel bad about using them, but really he is just old fashioned and hasn't conformed to the way that society is now (if that's worked for him this long, why not stay that way).

Another thing he always lectures us about is the actual credit card processing, He tells us all about how it charges us an extra 20 cents to use the credit card and that he hates that there is now a middle man (the bank) when it used to just be the customer and him. I guess he feels like it takes the closeness out of the transaction, which I kind of agree. He always knows everyone's name and talks to them about their families while they are checking out, so maybe since it doesn't take as long because you don't have to actually handle cash, he feels cut out of people's lives a little. It seems though that our society is getting more and more like that everyday though.